Friday, June 23, 2017

This picture was taken from a room in Calcutta, at the place where my mother’s head rested while I was being delivered. It shows the roof of a Jewish dharamsala, a charitable lodge for travellers.Unlike what is most popularly but not totally believed, life has no purpose, it is not intended, there is no reward, and nor is there a cycle of birth and rebirth. (Most often belief does not arise from intuition but is forced by superstition, lack of understanding of what life is, and threats or promises of punishment or reward.) The reality is that two chromosomes with compatible DNA accidentally combine and form rudimentary plant or animal or human life. As is its wont, all DNA material has a span through which it traverses before terminating or dying.In a lighter vein, I tell people that the first thing on being born was that I cried because I did not want to be born. In actuality, crying upon birth is caused by the loss of the familiar environs of the womb, the proximate rhythms of the mother's heartbeat, and other not very glamorous arrays of sounds in the company of which you are ensconced.I have somehow believed that if I did not want to be born, I had automatically forfeited in principle my right to create a life. I will never know if I am paying the price, or if I would have been less at loggerheads with the act of living, if I had had a child. At this stage in my life, it more rather than less, does not matter. What matters however, is that I have not wavered from my conviction: that I did not want to be born, that I did not and will not believe that life is cyclical or predestined, or mediates in its own destiny; that it is accidental and contingent, each contingency contingent upon another, ad infinitum.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

I received the following line in my email, concerning the prevailing Indian political scene:"Todo fodo barbaad karo koi kaam na honey do aur jab sobe debris ke neechey dab chukein tab dhitaang dhitaang bolo."Break, destroy, devastate. Prevent progress of all pending national agenda items. When everyone has been buried under the debris of mindless destruction, dance in ecstasy.Are our elected Parliamentarians stumbling over each other in their eagerness to convert coalition politics into demolition politics, and worse.What is happening to what goes by the name of human civilisation is so appalling that even if I were to exclude the rest of the world and just look around my own country, I would be incredulous and aghast if the people who are of influence and wield power to run it were to suddenly be hit by an avalanche of good sense. Have I reached the bottom or the pinnacle of cynicism.---------------------------Charu wrote:Bhai,
Politicians breaking, destroying all vestiges of decency and then dancing at
the demise of due diligence and processes seem to have shaken the building to
its foundations. It is lying on its back; or at least on its side.

Sunday, June 11, 2017

(Over 12,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide every year since 2013, according to the Central Government. 80% are driven to kill themselves because of loans given on such terms that they can never be repaid.)